A New Adventure Awaits You

The East Empire Company commissions the Dragonborn to slay a dragon that is interrupting trade routes throughout Skyrim. But is the dragon stirring up trouble with a particular reason and is there something more sinister behind it? An immersive new quest that takes you to the large island of Wyrmstooth. Battle across new landscapes and through new dungeons in this unofficial expansion for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

The quest begins for players at level 10 and above after you have been summoned by the Greybeards. Theodyn Bienne, a courier for the East Empire Company, will track you down wherever you are in Skyrim (or elsewhere) starting from the Bannered Mare in Whiterun and will deliver to you an important message. The task seems simple enough; slay a dragon that's stirring up trouble. But things are never that simple...

FAQ

Q. What patch level is required?
A. You should be running 1.8 or higher.

Q. Do I need Dawnguard, Hearthfire or Dragonborn to play Wyrmstooth?
A. No, neither of these are required to play Wyrmstooth.

Q. Do I need any other additional mods or plugins like SKSE?
A. No, nothing else is required except Skyrim.

Q. What ENB did you use to take the screenshots?
A. For the screenshots I used K ENB.

Q. I really liked this mod, what can I do to show my support?
A. Tell your friends about it, endorse and vote it on Nexus Mods so others can share in the adventure. I also accept Donations on PayPal.

Q. Is the mod stable?
A. The mod has been tested extensively and is completable. If you are experiencing intermittent crashes, try lowering your graphics settings or reconsider how many retexture mods you require as you may be overburdening your system.

Q. Is development of Wyrmstooth complete?
A. Yes.

Q. How much time did you spend working on Wyrmstooth?
A. About 2000 hours.

Q. What can I do with the Wyrmstone and Brimestone ore?
A. Originally I had planned to add new craftable weapons and armors however smithing material categories are hardcoded and the filesize of Wyrmstooth is already at the maximum size permissible on Steam.

Q. Can I mod Wyrmstooth?
A. You may make mods that use Wyrmstooth.esp as a master but you may NOT modify the Wyrmstooth.esp or Wyrmstooth.bsa files themselves.

Q. What kind of performance impact does Wyrmstooth have on Skyrim?
A. The overall impact on performance should be negligible to non-existent. Wyrmstooth is a quest/new lands mod, it doesn't make any gameplay changes. Most of the adventure takes place in a separate Wyrmstooth worldspace. At most you'll have 7 new NPCs in Skyrim before travelling to Wyrmstooth. If you do experience performance loss or instability see "Q. Is the mod stable?" and make sure Wyrmstooth.esp is the last master file loaded in your load list.

It began one sleepless night before a statistics exam. I had been working on (at that stage) a player home mod originally situated near Whitewatch Tower, that I made more for personal use than for anything else, and I was up thinking about different ways to make it more enjoyable. These ideas laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the island of Wyrmstooth. On the down side I bombed that statistics exam.

There’s nothing more daunting than being faced with a blank canvas and in Skyrim a blank world as far as the eye can see is the mother of blank canvases. At its onset I was faced with two options: generate a terrain in WorldMachine and import it into Skyrim via TESAnnwyn or manually sculpt it from scratch in the Creation Kit. Originally I liked the idea of having something to start with and have had experience in the past using WorldMachine and Vue to render realistically eroded landscapes.

Creating a natural-looking terrain isn’t very hard to pull off in WorldMachine; their node based system is both powerful and easy to use. The problem however is that it gave me too much to work with. Way too much. Almost equally as daunting as a blank canvas, the size and complexity of the landscape made me reconsider the amount of time I had available to dedicate to this project, after all it wasn’t going to be a render from afar but rather a landscape the player would be immersing themselves in and I wanted to have the landscape completed in a matter of months, not years.

Secondly, the island I had in mind was situated far to the north of Skyrim in the Sea Of Ghosts. Based on Elder Scrolls lore, the environment needed a flair of savagery. To me this could be expressed as tall jagged peaks and narrow mountain passes; a land uninviting. But these landscape features are pulled off using static mountain pieces, not the geometry of the landscape itself.

Originally I only planned for Wyrmstooth to be about as large as the Japhet’s Folly sidequest. I started with a quick test to gauge how long it would take me to flesh out a landscape by hand. The first iteration of Wyrmstooth simply consisted of a mining settlement, the docks, a mountain, and a road leading up to a Nordic barrow (today this is where a tree now falls above the road). It didn’t take long to navmesh and the island was small enough to negate the need to build LOD. All in all it only took about a week at most.

The next step was the barrow interior where I learned the importance of spreading a dungeon across multiple cells to avoid the hardcoded object limit (and associated crashes!). If I pretended Wyrmstooth was part of the official Elder Scrolls canon then I wanted Wyrmstooth Barrow to be the biggest dungeon in Tamriel. Simply creating an expansive 3-level Nordic barrow wasn’t enough – knowing all the puzzles and traps in advance I could blast through that place in under 30 minutes. I needed something more, something that would keep players down there for at least an hour or more without the tedium of endless Nordic hallways.

Dimfrost was the second worldspace added to the mod; an expansive underground cavern similar to Blackreach and almost as large. The idea was to take the player on a journey through different environments in a manner similar to the original Dungeon Siege game but in an open-world. Making this portion of the dungeon nearly made me quit working on the mod. Landscape editing and cluttering alone took at least 3 weeks of solid work and navmeshing took 3 weeks more. If anything I’d liken it to tediously grinding for levels in an oldschool rpg but for weeks and weeks on end. The payoff however was worth it.

However I was faced with a bit of a dilemma; the cavern beneath the island was far larger than the island above it! Having levelled up my world building skill at least 10 points or more I set out to expand the island above, sculpting new terrain by hand. I added a large crater to the island which would become the central feature. I used the mountains around the crater to separate the island into different ‘zones’ almost like spokes in a bicycle wheel which I could use to mentally partition the work required so it didn’t feel like one massive insurmountable task like Dimfrost. I started with the biggest mountain pieces first then added smaller and smaller details from there. Once I had my island I needed a story.

I felt the dragons in Skyrim were underutilized. Lore depicted them as beings possessing cunning and intelligence however gameplay depicted them as bears with wings and an epic soundtrack. So what I needed was a dragon with a plan: Vulthurkrah. Rather than spend his time flying around aimlessly, Vulthurkrah’s plan involved tempting adventurers to Wyrmstooth Barrow where they would subsequently fall to its many hazards and become part of an army of undead. Queue the Dragonborn. It’s simple, straightforward, and fits the main quest arc.

Wyrmstooth first and foremost had to appeal to myself as a player. Being a compulsive dungeon crawler I wanted to play something that I would find exciting having already invested hundreds of hours traversing the lands of ye olde Tamriel. I also wanted something that would rekindle the experience of an epic dungeon crawl from an oldschool rpg with a climatic finale.

The first release version of Wyrmstooth was uploaded on October 19th 2012 and development continues to this day with each new release further fleshing out and refining the adventure.

That article is really, really poor and the vine teaser, featuring barbed wire and a spinning record, almost certainly refers to the next fallout game. FYI, we had to wait 5 years for Skyrim because the dev team alternatively works on a fallout title and then an ES title now.

I have had this mod on my game since it first came out. It is usually the first one I play before Dawnguard and Dragonborn. I love buying the castle and refurnishing it. What you don't have, but I do have a mod for, is to hire maids, servants, a housecarl of your choice, and a steward.

You have made an excellent mod here and I hope you make more of a similar kind or maybe one that is as articulate as this one. Kudos to all who put a lot of hard work into this mod!!